Change-Creating Charts and Graphs in Google Docs

This is a PowerPoint aboutcreating Google documents so you can work on your Change essay with your group.

The second half of the PowerPoint describes how to create charts and graphs using Google that you can use for your visuals and insert into your Change Project paper.

Keep in mind that before you make a chart or graph, you need to have data! You should be doing your research to gather numerical information about your topic.

Also keep in mind that different kinds of data require different graphs. This PowerPoint goes over 3 of those kinds:

-Pie charts: for percentages of a whole

-Bar graphs: for comparing things

-Line graphs: for showing change over time

Ask yourself: what kind of numbers can I find that would be significant for my topic?

For example: My group is planting native trees in a local park to replace invasive tree species. One reason we are doing this is because native plants use less water, and we have a low-water environment in California with a lot of drought. We should not be planting things that use a lot of water. So I might decide to do a bar graph comparing the water usage of 3 different native trees and 3 different invasive trees. I might see from my graph that all three native plants use less water than their invasive brothers, so that's why we're planting native trees at the local park.

Second example: My group is collecting litter on a beach. It might be important to find out what kinds of things people are throwing away. We gather the trash and then sort it according to type: plastic, metal, glass, rubber, cloth, e-waste, etc. We do a bar graph showing how many pieces we found in each category, OR we do a pie chart showing what percentage of the whole trash pile is plastic, metal, glass, etc. We discover that the largest group is plastic bottles, the majority of which can actually be recycled. We ask the regional park that owns the beach if we can install recycling cans along the beach and put up signs about recycling plastic.